User Profile

I didn’t love this one as much as the first two. A ton of offscreen people died. Plenty on-screen too, of course, and some that I really liked. The idea, I think, was to redeem some folks who made terrible decisions. We were definitely supposed to sympathize with Clarissa Mao, for instance. Forgive her, maybe, by the end. I don’t really buy it, myself. I mean, I’ll probably think about her - assuming she comes back in subsequent stories - how the authors intend, but it’ll only be by ignoring her past entirely. It’s impossible to forgive the stuff she did. The lives she took. This ended with just the barest hint of what the alien investigator is still expecting from Holden. If there weren’t the rest of the series sitting on this kindle waiting for me to read it, I might be kind of pissed about how little of that story was revealed in this book. I mean, some tiny steps were taken, but mostly this was about humans being stupid and hurting each other for stupid reasons.

Goodreads says I marked this book “want to read” Feb. 2, 2012, about 13 years before I finally picked it up.

I've been meaning to read this for longer than there has existed this 30th anniversary edition, which I submit is a beautiful artifact. In fact, I may have read snippets of this from the author's website many years ago, but for a long time it's been on my to-read list. It was only because of laziness that I accidentally waited until this edition existed.

Mechner's journal starts out a page turner. I had a hard time putting it down the first time I started reading. But then about halfway through (sometime between when the first game releases and he begins “working” on the sequel), it really started to slow down for me, and there were long swaths that I just found tedious and relatively boring. (I didn’t much care that he wanted to be a movie director.) Fortunately, the writing was still quick and easy and I managed to finish this in only a few evenings. I’m glad I read it, but I wouldn’t really recommend it outside of a very narrow swath of game developers, and even then, with plenty of hedges and caveats about the era when this was written, and the obvious sense of privilege and entitlement that the writing exudes.

This was magnificent. I loved it and am tempted to buy a copy, even though I read it in only a week, which means there is still time for my wife to read it before we have to return this copy to the library. The imagery is wonderful, and so much of the language is beautiful and flowery, while still being incredibly easy to read and digest. (This is no small feat!) It probably helps that the stories are mostly borrowed, but maybe not! After all, they had to be distilled from centuries of retellings, and choosing which to include and what details and how to tell them is probably also difficult. Maybe even as difficult as coming up with your own plots and stories.

There are many stand-alone stories in here, some of them quite long, but many of them only one or two pages. With only one exception, they all flow brilliantly from one to the next, and I wouldn't change their order. (Sir Scipio's felt like the odd one out, but this is a minor criticism, and I enjoyed it all the same.) There is a version of these 673 pages that could have been released in the form of several books. And there are 4 chapters with pages in front labeled "Book I" through "Book IV". I do think that would have been fine (though possibly frustrating) but I'm quite happy to have read them all at once.

Toward the end of the book, as things are almost entirely already wrapped-up, we get these beautiful paragraphs:

What he wanted was to live in a timeless castle, a world wrought of old gold, where everything was noble and glorious and nothing ever changed. He wanted the battle to be over, he wanted to win and have won and be done with fighting forever and ever.

But of course it wasn't over. Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really ended, they just rolled one into the next. The past was never wholly lost, and the future was never quite found. We wander forever in a pathless forest, dropping with weariness, as home draws us back, and the grail draws us on, and we never arrive, and the quest never ends.

I want to joke that this is how it feels to read this book. But it definitely wasn't! I felt quite satisfied with the endings (so many of them!) present in this book. But I was touched by these paragraphs. They ring truer than just the in-context world of the book. In so much as we can take any lessons from the stories of King Arthur, Grossman's book feels like it is somewhat about this never-ending quest. The search for something, while also wanting to already just have found it. I believe that this is a universal truth, at least it is for me.

I am torn about this right now. It was brilliant in parts. LOVE the atmosphere, the world building, the imagery, the characters... pretty much everything but the plot... and maybe also the pacing. Many chapter breaks that ended abruptly, and then the next chapter begins in a completely different place, after some time (and presumably events) passing. Yet the scope of the book is a day or two at most! So much happens! Yet, we don't get all that clear a picture of it all. The world is incredibly dense, but still not fully-formed, in my imagination. There is much left to mystery.

And the worst part. The almost inexcusable part... is that it does not end. Not even one little bit. There is no conclusion. Not even the hint of one. Maybe 10 or 15 pages from the end, I thought, geez there's a lot to wrap up. I only wondered which mysteries would be revealed, not whether there would be any at all! And yet... I didn't buy this until the sequel was released. So I have that to read now. I'll start it with trepidation. I'm already stealing myself for more of the same.